JORGE LUIS BORGES, A MASTER OF FANTASY AND FABLE, IS DEAD

By EDWARD A. GARGAN

Published: June 15, 1986

Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine short-story writer, poet and essayist who was considered one of Latin America's greatest writers, died yesterday in Geneva, where he had been living for three months. He was 86 years old.

Mr. Borges died of liver cancer, the executor of his estate, Osvaldo Luis Vidaurre, said in Buenos Aires.

While almost unknown outside Argentina before 1961, his stories, punctilious in their language and mysterious in their opaque parodoxes, later attained a modest following in the United States, a following that grew steadily to international proportions.

His writings explored the crannies of the human psyche, the fantastic within the apparently mundane, imaginary bestiaries and fables of obscure libraries and arcane scholarship.

His prose provoked the literary imaginations of general readers, scholars and critics, and many hailed him as the most important Latin American writer of this century.

Among his works of fiction that have appeared in the United States are ''Ficciones,'' ''The Aleph and Other Stories'' and ''Labyrinths,'' all published in 1962, and ''A Universal History of Infamy,'' in 1971. Among his collections of essays available in English are ''The Book of Imaginary Beings'' (1969) and ''An Introduction to American Literature'' (1971). ''Selected Poems, 1923-1967'' was published in 1972 and ''In Praise of Darkness,'' which consists of poetry and short pieces, in 1974.

In 1975 John Updike wrote that Mr. Borges's ''driest paragraph is somehow compelling.''

''His fables are written from a height of intelligence less rare in philosophy and physics than in fiction,'' he said. ''Furthermore, he is, at least for anyone whose taste runs to puzzles or pure speculation, delightfully entertaining.''

Moreover, Mr. Updike insisted, ''For all his modesty and reasonableness of tone, he proposes some sort of essential revision in literature itself.''

It is, the historian and philosopher George Steiner wrote, perhaps something even more: ''Borges's universalism is a deeply felt imaginative strategy, a maneuver to be in touch with the great winds that blow from the heart of things. 'Turning the Kaleidoscope'

''When he cites fictitious titles, imaginary cross-references, folios and writers that have never existed, Borges is simply regrouping counters of reality into the shape of possible other worlds. When he moves, by wordplay and echo, from language to language, he is turning the kaleidoscope, throwing the light on another patch of the wall.''

One of his earliest short stories, ''Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,'' compressed this embrace of language and illusion, foreshadowing the tenor of his later work. In the story, written in 1938, Mr. Borges proposed, in short, an extreme examination of T. S. Eliot's dictum that each new work of art alters the perception of previously existing works of art.

For Mr. Borges, the short story - a literary form ''whose indispensable elements are economy and a clearly stated beginning, middle and end'' -was the most compelling form. Once he wrote: ''In the course of a lifetime devoted chiefly to books, I have read but few novels and, in most cases, only a sense of duty has enabled me to find my way to their last page. I have always been a reader and rereader of short stories.'' 'Slow, Summer Twilight'

Beginning in 1927, when he had a series of operations on his eyes, Mr. Borges was increasingly afflicted by blindness, which ran in his family. While he called it a ''slow, summer twilight,'' it did not impede his work.

Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires, in the house of his maternal grandparents, on Aug. 24, 1899. His father, of Italian, Jewish and English heritage, professed the law but, as Mr. Borges once wrote, ''was a philosophical anarchist - a disciple of Spencer -and also a teacher of psychology.'' His mother, of Argentine and Uruguayan stock, lived far into her 90's and translated William Saroyan, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Virginia Woolf and Herman Melville into Spanish.

While he was very young, his parents moved to the northern suburbs of the capital, to Palermo, a place he later described as a slum. But it was not, he wrote, a slum in the American sense. It was, rather, a district where ''shabby-genteel people as well as more undesirable sorts'' lived.

At the age of 6 or 7, the young Borges began to write. ''I was expected to be a writer,'' he recalled much later in life. He confessed that his first writing was modeled on classic Spanish writers, mostly Cervantes. The young man's first effort, ''The Fatal Helmet,'' was avowedly romantic - ''nonsensical,'' he later called it - and very much a stylistic derivative of Cervantes.

In 1914 the family moved to Europe so that Jorge and his sister could attend school in Geneva. Jorge enrolled at the College of Geneva. In school, the young man was immersed in Latin, and outside it he tackled German. He learned to love the language through Heine and found his way to Schopenhauer, who was to be his favorite. First Poem Published in Spain

''Were I to choose a single philosopher, I would choose him,'' Mr. Borges wrote. ''If the riddle of the universe can be stated in words, I think these words would be in his writings.''